Being from Baltimore, I take civic pride in its writers, including Edgar Allan Poe, H.L. Mencken, Ogden Nash, Anne Tyler, and Frank Zappa – an eclectic bunch to be sure.
I feel a particular kinship with Zappa. Like my father, his father worked at the Edgewood Arsenal, where the U.S. Army manufactured and carried out human experiments on chemical weapons. The Edgewood Arsenal is part of the Aberdeen Proving Ground, where depleted uranium weapons were tested, and where a small nuclear reactor experienced a partial meltdown in 1968.
Zappa, like me, suffered repeated earaches. Like me, he was subjected to a now-discredited treatment, championed by researchers at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, of having radium pellets inserted up his nose.
Perhaps reflecting his family background, Zappa penned a quote that seems particularly apt in these troubled times: “Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex.”
Arguably, the main preoccupation nowadays of nation states – and their “leaders” – is to serve the corporations that profit from the military industrial complex. An example is General Dynamics. It makes the 2000-pound MX-84 bombs that the U.S. ships to Israel, and that Israel then drops on Gaza.
Will the U.S. president-elect stop these shipments, or find ways to diminish the overwhelming influence of defense contractors? Don’t count on it. Stock market investors responded enthusiastically to his win.
The “system” includes not only the corporations that “build the big bombs” (to quote Bob Dylan), but also the banks and investment firms that finance them. Canada has only one entry among the world’s top 100 defense companies (nearly half are U.S.-based), but many of those U.S. corporations have branch plants here. And the U.S. President-elect is pushing us to increase our military spending.
According to a May 2024 report from “Don’t Bank on the Bomb,” Untenable Investments, Canadian banks are heavily invested in U.S. defense companies that operate nuclear weapons facilities: “Outside of the US, the top investor is Canada’s Sun Life Financial, with $8.7 billion invested in nuclear weapon producers.”
Even the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) Investment Board, responsible for more than 22 million CPP contributors and beneficiaries, is listed in the report, with its $682 million investment in the Netherlands-based Airbus Group, the prime contractor for the ballistic missiles used in the French nuclear arsenal.
In 2015, the Harper government handed over control of nuclear facilities owned by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) to a company called “Canadian Nuclear Laboratories” (CNL). Under a 10-year, $10-billion contract, a multinational consortium dominated by two top U.S nuclear weapons producers, Fluor and Jacobs, is in charge.
Fluor, the lead consortium member, also manages the production of U.S. nuclear weapons components at the Savannah River Site, and recently won a contract to operate the Pantex Plant, where the weapons are assembled.
Although the consortium goes under the name “Canadian National Energy Alliance” (CNEA), five of its seven directors are Americans. CNEA owns CNL and appoints its management team.
In 2023, via contract money funneled through AECL, Canadian taxpayers paid average salaries of $510,301 to each of 44 CNL executives and non-executive contract staff, mostly non-Canadians — well above the Prime Minister’s $406,200 salary. According to the 2024 AECL Annual Report, “AECL makes payments to CNL and its parent company, Canadian National Energy Alliance… as per the terms of the contractual arrangement.”
In 2024 “Contractual amounts paid or payable” were $1,415,588,000, with $237,404,000 going to CNEA as “Contractual expenses.”
If we pay hundreds of millions of dollars each year to corporations that produce nuclear weapons to operate our nuclear research facilities, we’re well embedded in the military industrial complex.
To divert our attention, the nuclear power industry and its political entertainment division (e.g., the Canadian, Ontario, Saskatchewan, and Alberta governments) claim that nuclear power produces “clean, affordable energy” and “life-saving medical isotopes”.
A fact sheet from the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility points out that “Modern medicine does not depend on nuclear power,” and that “All electricity producing reactors could be shut down permanently with little or no impact on best medical practices.” Regarding the “affordability” of Ontario’s nuclear-dominated power grid, a Globe and Mail editorial notes “the granddaddy of big-ticket bribes: the $7.3-billion that the province says it will spend this year in rebates to households, poor and rich alike, for their electricity bills.”
By all means, let’s be entertained by politicians, but let’s not forget who’s paying, and who’s pulling the strings.
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